London is burning for many reasons, not that the average media commentary will tell you much beyond the non-fact that youths are senselessly looting.
The Con-Lib coalition has pushed harsh austerity measures and the country's economy has stalled, creating a huge wave of joblessness just at the moment that the Cameron administration finishes off that part of the social safety net that Maggie didn't savage herself.
Add to the economic unrest the profound malaise occasioned by Murdoch's phone-hacking scandal. The scandal continues to unfold, but already has reached into Cameron's personal circle, Scotland Yard, and perhaps to his U.S. companies. The sense from people I know is that social immobility, the corruption in government and finance, and the massive disconnect between 10 Downing and the lives of those just a few miles east in Hackey has bred a profound sense of cynicism.
After the riots came the looting. Across London windows were smashed, and shops emptied. On Monday experts said social exclusion and the breakdown of law and order could have spurred looters to disregard social norms.
"Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future," said criminologist and youth culture expert Professor John Pitts.
Unlike most people, some of those looting had no stake in conformity, he said. "Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose."
Nina Power adds
Since the coalition came to power just over a year ago, the country has seen multiple student protests, occupations of dozens of universities, several strikes, a half-a-million-strong trade union march and now unrest on the streets of the capital (preceded by clashes with Bristol police in Stokes Croft earlier in the year). Each of these events was sparked by a different cause, yet all take place against a backdrop of brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures. The government knows very well that it is taking a gamble, and that its policies run the risk of sparking mass unrest on a scale we haven't seen since the early 1980s. With people taking to the streets of Tottenham, Edmonton, Brixton and elsewhere over the past few nights, we could be about to see the government enter a sustained and serious losing streak.
Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)
Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.
London is a harbinger of things to come.
The U.S. hasn't seen this sort of rioting in decades, but how soon will the combination of joblessness, the lack of a social safety net, and an overwhelming sense that the working woman and man, the poor, the elderly, and the ill have been pushed out of the political process and abandoned by their political leaders lead to social combustion?
Just as David Cameron's ascendancy would not have been possible with Tony Blair's Third Way and Gordon Brown's incompetence, so here we need to consider the complicity between Democrats and Republicans in the implementation of a devastating neoliberal assault on the bottom 95%. The scope and scale of the failure in England is owned now by all the major parties and the potential for such a conflagration here is the result of years of fully bi-partisan effort.
It's all well and good to hope, but hope is not a plan. I don't know many people who can be hopeful without a job, with a part-time, no benefits job, or who can hope as their children are shut out of college, or who are foreclosed on while the bank fraud that crashed the economy goes largely unpunished.
It's all well and good to condemn the rioters' violence, but the economic violence that's been inflicted on people here with four decades of wage stagnation, outrageous health care costs, dimming job prospects, and rising costs of everything from fuel to food cannot be passively accepted indefinitely. The arc of history isn't infinitely flexible. Neoliberalism is burning our society down around us.
Is America doing everything it can to prevent this happening here? I hear so many on this blog argue for the inability of the Democrats to effect change or to redirect the national conversation. Are we to be content with our future being hollowed out by Tea Party malignance and Democratic malfeasance? As our wealth gap escalates and austerity-driven politics fails workers, students, the elderly, the poor is London simply our grim future?
Below the fold I'll post videos of London in flames.
How long until people here react with the same intensity?